Long-Term Musical Training Alters Tactile Temporal-Order Judgment

Long-term musical training is an enriched multisensory training environment that can alter uni- and multisensory substrates and abilities. Amongst these altered abilities are faster reaction times for simple and complex sensory tasks. The crossed arm temporal-order judgement (TOJ) task is a complex tactile task in which TOJ error rate increases when arms are crossed. Reaction times (RTs) for this task are typically proportionate to the difficulty of the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) and increase more when the arms are crossed than when uncrossed. The objective of this study was to study the impact of musical training on RTs and accuracy for the crossed arm TOJ task. Seventeen musicians and 20 controls were tested. Musicians had significantly faster RTs for all crossed arm conditions and half of the uncrossed conditions. However, musicians had significantly more TOJ errors for the crossed posture. We speculate that faster musician TOJ RTs leave little time to consolidate conflicting internal and external task-related information when crossing the arms, leading to increased incorrect responses. These results provide novel insights on the potential mechanisms underlying the increased TOJ error rates when arms are crossed. Moreover, they add to the growing literature of altered sensory ability in musicians and propose an unexpected consequence of faster reaction times.